Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: A Series

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Goblina and the Magic Ribbon is the name of an ongoing series that started in Fall, 2024. The work presented here is all a part of the same series in different iterations.

“Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: Sessions 0-4,” is the culmination of my experimentation within this series. The work is an installation made up of several ceramic vessels, chalices, mixed-media objects, and wine, all on top of a bed of sand reminiscent of a beach.  Inspired by queer-theory, game design, and role-playing, the piece seeks to explore the relationship between reparative art and play, worldbuilding, and material culture. Reparative play and art ask us to reconsider our world and lives through these activities allowing us to move within these lived experiences as we imagine more hopeful futures.

Using Dungeons and Dragons 5e as source material, I’ve begun writing the campaign, “Goblina and the Magic Ribbon.”  In this space, my cohorts and I explore Stamvathes, a transnormative world mainly inhabited by short, gender-queer goblins.  As we move from fictional isle to fictional isle, we meet the locals of this plane and learn about what a transnormative world might value through socializing, problem-solving, adventuring, and experiencing a place where heteronormativity isn’t our reality.  We then manifest these memories into the objects you see here: remnants of our currently-played sessions captured within these vessels, chalices, and mixed-media mementos.

Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: Sessions 0 – 4
5 x 5 x 5′
Glazed Stoneware, Mixed media, rope, wine, sand, textile
Made in collaboration with: Pageturn Penscratch (Hayley Glossop), Fig “Figgy” Fish (Maya Kamachi), Róisín (Emma Bradshaw), Moolia (Jesse McIver), Brisket (Shea O’Donnell), and Nekk Featherington (Fran Cavalletti)

The enmeshment of reparative play, artmaking, and material culture hold a special place for me: as a Greek trans woman, I have been enamored by the past and present artifacts of my culture, but frequently see how trans people are missing from Greek history and outright excluded by current Greek Orthodoxy.  Ceramic’s rich history of storytelling makes it an exemplary conduit for this mythmaking. Using these objects, I channel the material culture of ancient Greece as I alter these vessels through form and surface, leaving the viewer with the impression of the familiar subverted through new narratives and augmentations. These odd, decorative vessels simultaneously remind of us our reality while maintaining an otherworldliness: elaborately lobed amphora covered in an unfamiliar oribe sits next to traditional Greek calyx decorated with out-of-place narratives finished in a strangely pink celadon. On either side, these objects are surrounded by peculiar chalices, marbled clay curios, and toy fish, manifesting the material culture I’ve developed with my friends as we leave behind traces of our adventures in Stamvathes through playful knick-knacks and marks in the sand. The viewer is confronted by this ephemeral narrative made material as we’ve reimagined and actualized a more optimistic world through reparative play and artmaking, further blurring the line between what is privileged as real and the ostensibly fictional.

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Although I consider this work far from done, I invite you to go to my website for more information. Here, you will find my research and creative writings regarding this work. You will also find the currently incomplete materials you need to play my campaign, “Goblina and the Magic Ribbon.” Through my Masters of Studio Arts beginning in September, 2025, I hope to be able to continue this work, eventually culminating in my own DnD Module that I can provide to others. In this way, I hope that we can all adventure reparative worlds together and look toward more promising futures.

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Other Related Works

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“Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: The Night After,” is an interactive installation where the viewer is able to step into a moment of a story: the night after a wedding.  By investigating the objects on the bedspread, including labelled garters and ties, hand-painted wallpaper, and ceramic vessels, the viewer can piece together what happened ‘last night.’  As they investigate, the notion of a traditional marriage falls apart, replaced by the story the work tells of a polyamorous, transsexual relationship, confronting the viewer with their own assumptions regarding what gets to be called, ‘love,’ ‘marriage,’ and ‘normal.’  The mixture of commonplace objects, such as the comforter and pillows, and fantastical objects, such as the ewer, jug, and wallpaper, conflate the line between our reality and the fictional world I’ve created.  From this liminal space, the viewer can reconsider the assumption that our reality is the only possible one as they live a moment in another.

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Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: The Night After
Glazed stoneware, craft paper, acrylic paint, comforter, bed sheets, pillow cases, pillows, rose perfume, olive oil, blueberry juice, red wine
7 x 7 x 7’
2024

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“Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: Tea Offering,” explores the same story in a different moment.  The work is a miniature installation comprised of a clay-covered plinth, gardening hoe, and tea set.  The set-up removes the work from the gallery setting and places it within a unique world.  Flanked by a gardening hoe, this ornamental work juxtaposes our notions of the austere task of farming, with a ritual, decorative object.  As the viewer investigates the teapot, they see representations of transbodies on this iconic form where they are usually missing.  By placing transbodies on a traditional form, I interrogate a history where trans people are missing, prompting the viewer to ask about the nature of this make-believe transnormative world, the significance of the object, its decoration, and the possibility that neither transness nor labour need to carry the connotations they do in our world.

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Goblina and the Magic Ribbon: Tea Offering
Glazed stoneware, gardening hoe, clay, plinth
4 x 2.7 x 2.5″
2024

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